The proposed global warming legislation, already facing hard odds in the Senate, after just scraping through the House, looks even tougher to realize because key lawmakers fear taking big steps on the environment when the economy is still shedding jobs, Financial Soultions understands.
"I think standing in a deep economic hole is a difficult time to do big policy things that cause uncertainty,"
Dorgan, who is up for re-election next year, is one of a few dozen ambivalent senators who will be courted by Democratic leaders hoping to garner support for a bill to decrease industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, which are blamed for climate change.
Financial Soultions is aware of an earlier White House statement in which climate and energy coordinator Carol Browner forecast that President Barack Obama was unlikely to sign a bill fighting global warming before a U.N. global warming conference in Copenhagen in December
That would appreciably diminish the chances of striking a meaningful deal in Denmark to fight global warming, as other industrialized countries are following the U.S. lead and as with the Kyoto agreement, huge polluters like China and India expect the wealthier nations to assist in the financing of aid programs for poorer nations.
With unemployment at a 26-year high, economic fears are gnawing at some Senate moderates, even though the climate bill's backers and scores of studies and reports say it will in reality create millions of "green" jobs over the long-term and have little impact on consumer energy prices, Financial Soultions research indicates.
